Brasyl (7 page)

"Senhor, with respect, what do you require of me?"

Nóbrega dressed and savored a second acculico. Its effect was
almost instantaneous: Quinn wondered if Nóbrega might be
habituated to this benign, stimulating herb.

"For the most precise measurements, Dr. Falcon must conduct his
experiment on the line of the equator. He has picked a spot five
hundred miles above São José Tarumás on the Rio
Negro as the most favorable, where what he calls 'continental
influences' are in equilibrium."

"I understand. I might travel with him."

"The other way around, Father. He might travel with you. The
wrath of the crown is properly turned to the Dutch pirates and
adventurers, but the memory of Duguay-Trouin and his pirates
strutting around Rio like gamecocks is all too fresh. Has the
father-provincial apprised you of the political situation on the
Amazon?"

"I understand it is in a state of renegotiation."

"France has long held ambitions in South America far beyond that
plague-hole in the Guianas. An uncertain transfer of territory could
hand them their opportunity to annex everything north of the
Amazon-Solimões. They could have aldeias fortified, tribes
armed with modern weaponry before we could even get a fleet to
Belém."

"You suspect Dr. Falcon is an agent," Luis Quinn said.

"Versailles would have been insane not to have asked him."

Magalhães spoke now. "I require you merely to observe and
record. I have already alluded to your particular sensory acuity, and
your facility at languages .... "

"Was I chosen as an admonitory or a spy?"

"Our duty is of course to the greater glory of God," de
Magalhães said.

"Of course, Father." Luis Quinn dipped his head. New light
fell on the table and the fat-leaved, aromatic shrubs: woman slaves
brought baskets to dress the dinner table set up in the cool of the
cloister. Candles sparked to life; covered silver dishes were laid on
the cloth.

"Excellent," cried Nóbrega leaping up from his seat,
rubbing his hands. "That coca-stuff is all very fine, but it
makes you damnable hungry."

A flurry, a whistle of wings in the night above Luis Quinn's head.
Dark shapes dived on folded, curved wings to perch along the tiled
eave of the private garden. Light caught hooked beaks, round cunning
eyes, a raised, agile claw. Parrots, thought Luis Quinn.
A task
most difficult, by God's grace.

Marcelina loved that minuscule, precise moment when the needle
entered her face. It was silver; it was pure. It was the violence
that healed, the violation that brought perfection. There was no
pain, never any pain, only a sense of the most delicate of
penetrations, like a mosquito exquisitely sipping blood, a precision
piece of human technology slipping between the gross tissues and
cells of her flesh. She could see the needle out of the corner of her
eye; in the foreshortened reality of the ultra-close-up it was like
the stem of a steel flower. The latex-gloved hand that held the
syringe was as vast as the creating hand of God: Marcelina had
watched it swim across her field of vision, seeking its spot, so
close, so thrillingly, dangerously close to her naked eyeball. And
then the gentle stab. Always she closed her eyes as the fingers
applied pressure to the plunger. She wanted to feel the poison
entering her flesh, imagine it whipping the bloated, slack, lazy
cells into panic, the washes of immune response chemicals as they
realized they were under toxic attack; the blessed inflammation, the
swelling of the wrinkled, lined skin into smoothness, tightness,
beauty, youth.

Marcelina Hoffman was well on her way to becoming a Botox junkie.
Such a simple treat; the beauty salon was on the same block as Canal
Quatro. Marcelina had pioneered the lunch-hour face lift to such an
extent that Lisandra had appropriated it as the premise for an entire
series. Whore. But the joy began in the lobby with Luesa the
receptionist in her high-collared white dress saying "Good
afternoon, Senhora Hoffman," and the smell of the beautiful
chemicals and the scented candles, the lightness and brightness of
the frosted glass panels and the bare wood floor and the
cream-on-white cotton wall hangings, the New Age music that she
scorned anywhere else (Tropicalismo hippy-shit) but here told her,
"You're wonderful, you're special, you're robed in light, the
universe loves you, all you have to do is reach out your hand and
take anything you desire."

Eyes closed, lying flat on the reclining chair, she felt her
work-weary crow's-feet smoothed away, the young, energizing tautness
of her skin. Two years before she had been in New York on the
Real
Sex in the City
production and had been struck by how the ianqui
women styled themselves out of personal empowerment and not, as a
carioca would have done, because it was her duty before a
scrutinizing, judgmental city. An alien creed: thousand-dollar shoes
but no pedicure. But she had brought back one mantra among her
shopping bags, an enlightenment she had stolen from Jennifer Aniston
cossmetics ad. She whispered it to herself now, in the warm,
jasmine-and-vetiver-scented sanctuary as the botulin toxins diffused
through her skin.

Because I'm worth it.

"Oh, I love the World Cup." Dona Bebel visited twice a
week. Mondays the dry cleaning: dusting, vacuuming, putting things
away. Thursdays the wet cleaning: bathroom and toilet, dishes and the
laundry Marcelina strewed across her bedroom until by Wednesday
evening she could not see the floor. She was a round woman in the
indefinable late-fifties, early-sixties; hair heaved back into a
headache-inducing bun; eternally in leggings, baggy T-shirts, and
Havaianas; and Marcelina treasured her beyond pearls gold cocaine
commissions.

"Querida, she comes twice a week, does your disgusting pants,
and it's still all there when she leaves?" Vitor was an old gay
man, a former participant in a daytime makeover show Marcelina had
produced, who lived a handful of streets from her decrepit apartment
block with its back hard to the sheer rocks of the morro. An old and
unrepentant Copa-ista, he took tea in the same cafe in the same
evening hour every day to watch his bairro pass by. Marcelina had
taken to meeting him once a week for doces and bitching as part of
her extensive alt dot family, all bound to her in different degrees
of gratitude or sycophancy. "Whatever she asks, you pay her."

After a succession of Skinny Marias who had thieved all around them
as if it were an additional social security levy and hid warrens of
dust bunnies under the bed, Marcelina had been reluctant to take on
another cleaner from Pavão. Bur price was price—the
favela tucked away like an infolded navel into the hills behind
Arpoador was that that unspeakable elephant of cheap labor upon which
the Copa depended. She left the glasses twinkling like diamonds, the
whites blinding, and when she discovered what it was that Marcelina
did for her money, pitched a program idea: "You should do a show
where you go and clean up people's houses while they're out at work.
I'd watch that. Nothing people like better than looking at someone
else's filth."

Filthy Pigs
had on-screen screamfests, fights,
camera-smashings; destroyed friendships of years; opened generational
rifts children against parrents; ruined relationships; wrecked
marriages; and provoked at least one shooting. Audiences watched
through their fingers, faintly murmuring, "No, no."
Raimundo Sifuentes had thundered upon it in the review pages of O
Globo as "the real filthy pigs are at Canal Quatro." It was
Marcelina's first water-cooler show.

Over three years many of Marcelina's best commissions had come from
Dona Bebel.
Kitsch and Bitch
, which had brought Vitor to
prominence and turned his small store of immaculate twentieth-century
kitschery into a must-shop destination featured in in-flight
magazines, had come from a commment as Dona Bebel slung the washing
over the line in Marcelina's precious roof garden that she always
knew which men she cleaned for were gay because they had always had
1950s plastic around the place.

Guilt and remorse were as alien to Marcelina as a nun's habit, but
she honorably put a sliver of her bonus into Dona Bebel's weekly
envelope for every commission she won. She never asked what Dona
Bebel thought when she saw her casual aside up in sixteen-by-nine
with full graphics. She did not even know if Dona Bebel watched Canal
Quatro. She was right off its demographic.

"Oooh, World Cup." Marcelina's whites went round in the
washing machine on Wets Thursday. The apartment's bare, tiled floors
smelled of bleach and pine. "They're going to put a big screen
up down at the Gatinha Bar. I'm going to watch them all. Brazil
versus Italy in the final, I say. I'd put money on it. This time
we'll beat them. They may have the best defense in Europe, but our
Magic Quadrilateral will go through them like a knife. I think a
program abour the World Cup would be a very good idea—I'd watch
it. But if you want controversial, you have to go for the Fateful
Final."

"The what?" Marcelina said over the twelve hundred rev spin
cycle gearing up.

For the first time Dona Bebel was taken aback.

"You mean, you don't know about the Fateful Final? Every true
Brazilian should have July sixteenth 1950 engraved on her heart. This
wasn't a soccet match. This was our Hiroshima. I don't exaggerate.
After the Fateful Final, nothing was the same again."

"Tell me," said Marcelina, settling down on top of the
upturned plastic laundry basket.

Well, I was a very little girl at the time and we didn't have a
television, no one did, but . . . "

This is not history. This is legend. We built the Maracanã for
the 1950 World Cup—then, as it is now, the greatest stadium in
the world—and in front of two hundred thousand people, we were
going to show the world the beauty and the poetry of Brazilian
futebol. A war had ended, a new world had risen from its ashes; this
was the World Cup of the Furure in the Nation of the Future.

This was the team: it was as great as any Seleção, as
great even as the squad of 1970, but you won't see it listed on the
statue outside the Maracana. Coach: Flavio Costa. Front to back:
Chico, Jair da Rosa Pinto, Ademir, Zizinho, Friaça; Bigode,
Danilo, Bauer; Juvenal, Augusto; Barbosa. Five three two. Beautiful.
Moaçir Barbosa: you hear much more about him. Now, in 1950 the
system was different from the way it is now; it was a group system
all the way to the final.

My father was working then on a bridge and had money, so he bought a
radio just for the World Cup. He wired it into the streetlight. It
was the only radio on the street, so everyone came around to listen.
You could not move in our good room for people come for the game.

We kicked off the World Championships on the twenty-fourth of June
against Mexico. Bam! Down they went. Four-nil. Next! Switzerland.
Here we had a bit of a wobble—but that's the best time to have
a wobble, early on. A draw, two all. Now we had to beat Yugoslavia to
qualify for the finals group. There can be only one from each group.
We played it at the new Maracanã and we won: two nil. We're
through to the final group!

In the final group are Sweden, Spain, and Uruguay, the Sky-blue
Celestes.

Now we have to put the radio in the window, because we couldn't fit
all the people who wanted to listen into the house. My father set it
on an oil drum, and people lined up all the way down the hill.

Game one, we crush Sweden seven-one. Game two, Spain, six-one.
Nothing—nothing—can stop Brazil. This will be one of the
greatest Seleçãos in history. The only thing that
stands between us and glory is tiny Uruguay. Rio expects, the nation
expects, the world expects we will raise the Jules Rimet in the most
beautiful stadium in the world in the most beautiful city in the
world.
O Mundo
even prints pictures of the team in the early
editions with the headline:
These Are the World Champions!

On July sixteenth one-tenth of Rio is inside that oval. A tenth of
the entire city, yes. The rest of the nation is listening on the
radio: everyone remembers exactly where they were when the referee
blew for kickoff. The first half is goalless. But in the
twenty-eighth minute something very strange happens: Uruguay's
captain, Obdulio Varela, hits Bigode, and it's like macumba. Everyone
knows the energy in the stadium has changed; you could even feel it
through the radio. The axé was no longer with Brazil. But then
one minute into the second half, Friaça sees the angle . . .
shoots. Gooool do Brasil! One-nil, one-nil, one-nil, one-nil.
Everyone is dancing and singing in the house and every other house
and all the way down the street onto the Copa. Then in the
sixty-eighth minute, Gigghia for Uruguay picks up that macumba and
runs with the ball. He's past Bigode on the right wing, crosses.
Schiaffino's on the end of it and puts it past Barbosa. God himself
could not have stopped that shot.

But we can still win. We've come back from worse than this. We're
Brazil. Then, at 4:33, all the clocks stop. Once again Gigghia beats
Bigode. He's into the box. But this time he doesn't cross. He's close
on the post, but he takes the shot. Barbosa doesn't think anyone
could get in from that angle. He moves too slow, too late. The ball's
in the back of the net.
Goal to Uruguay
, says Luis Mendes on
the radio, and then, as if he can't believe what he said, he says it
again:
Goal to Uruguay
. And again, six times he says it. It's
true. Uruguay two, Brazil one. There's not a sound in the stadium,
not a sound in our house or on the street, not in the whole of Pavão,
not in the whole of Rio. Gigghia always said, only three people ever
silenced the Maracana with one movement: Frank Sinatra, the pope, and
him.